WAR IN UKRAINEScholars at Western Universities Rethink Russian Studies in Wake of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

By Todd Prince

Published 4 January 2023

In Ukraine, Moscow’s unprovoked war has killed tens of thousands of people and laid cities and towns to waste. At universities across the West, it has thrust Russia’s history of imperialism and colonialism to the forefront of Slavic and Eurasian academic discussion — from history and political science to art and literature.

When more than 2,000 Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies specialists from around the world gather in Philadelphia later this year for their largest annual conference, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will dominate the discussion — or loom large over the proceedings, at the very least.

In Ukraine, Moscow’s unprovoked war has killed tens of thousands of people and laid cities and towns to waste. At universities across the West, it has thrust Russia’s history of imperialism and colonialism to the forefront of Slavic and Eurasian academic discussion — from history and political science to art and literature.

The war is forcing scholars, departments, and university officials to question how they teach the history of Russia, the former Soviet Union, and the region, what textbooks and sources they use, whom they hire, which archives they mine for information, and even what departments should be named.

The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) has made “decolonization” — which it describes as “a profoundly political act of re-evaluating long-established and often internalized hierarchies, of relinquishing and taking back power” — the theme of its 2023 conference.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has led to widespread calls for the reassessment and transformation of Russo-centric relationships of power and hierarchy both in the region and in how we study it,” the association says in a notice on the convention.

The war is really an earth-moving event and academia — as part of that world — has been shaken,” Edward Schatz, the director of the Center for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (CERES) at the University of Toronto, told RFE/RL. “I feel like it is impossible to do things the way we have done it all along. Something has to change. The question is how much changes and along what dimensions.”

Schatz says the CERES faculty will hold a two-day meeting in January to discuss a host of issues including the curriculum and whether to change the center’s name. Some faculty have questioned why an institution covering a region that spans two continents and reaches from the Atlantic to the Pacific should have only one country — Russia — in its name.

In Britain, meanwhile, the University of Cambridge is holding a series of lectures under the banner “Rethinking Slavonic Studies.” Among other examples, scholars in North America are working on a book of essays that will focus on “decolonizing Eastern European and Eurasian art and material culture.”